Books of Interest in Fall 2024 Issue of ZEKE

Edited by Alice Currey

A Sense of Shifting: Queer Artists Reshaping Dance

By Coco Romack and Yael Malka

Chronicle Books, 2024 | 208 pages | $27.50

Enter the groundbreaking world of queer dance in this gorgeous collection of stories and photographs. This book showcases twelve individual artists and dance companies who are reclaiming traditional genres and building inclusive dance communities. Whether professionals or amateurs, ballerinas or experimental performers, pole dancers or line dancers, these artists embody the queer experience in unique ways. Photographer Yael Malka invites us into an intimate, visceral experience of rehearsals and performances, and writer Coco Romack offers reflections on the creative process drawn from in-depth interviews with the dancers. The collection explores an array of experiences of dancing in a wheelchair, navigating the intersections of gender and race, engaging with cultural inheritance on one’s own terms, and even striving to make non-activist art when simply existing as a queer person can be a political action. This beautiful book documents the rise of a new generation of artists and will inspire dance lovers, LGBTQIA+ creators, and anyone who delights in the power of the human body in motion. 

The New Cubans

By Jean-François Bouchard

powerHouse Books, 2024 | 256 pages | $50

Jean-François Bouchard’s cinematic photography illuminates the previously under reported culture of contemporary Cuba, revealing a polymorphic, intimate community in which personal expression and gender diversity are vivaciously celebrated. Preconceptions of communist social uniformity and Cold War-era clichés are cleverly subverted in this ambitious photographic journey that reveals the emerging subcultures in Havana. Comprising more than 150 intimate, revealing photographs, The New Cubans is augmented with profiles of the fascinating individuals who welcomed Bouchard into their world. Texts include an interview with renowned photographer Matthew Leifheit, an essay by Cuban art critic Jorge Peré, and heartfelt contributions from the photographer’s close collaborator, Devon Ruiz. Showcasing a Cuba few outsiders have seen or possibly even know exists, the book celebrates the lesser-known but vibrant Cuban inclusiveness, gender-diversity openness, and the lifestyles of the younger, connected Cubans who will shape the future of the island or leave it behind in search of new possibilities. 

Borderlands

By Francesco Anselmi

Kehrer, 2024 | 136 pages | $54

Borderlands is a documentary essay shot along the U.S. side of the border with Mexico between 2017 and 2019 at the height of the Trump era. Transcending the immediate emergency narrative associated with border-related issues, this series instead offers a nuanced exploration of a region teeming with life, stories, and contradictions. Borderlands is accompanied by an essay by Francisco Cantù that weaves through the landscape and the lives captured by Anselmi, inviting readers to confront the myths, the realities, and the human experiences of the boundaries. Through Anselmi’s gaze, the borderlands reveal themselves as a unique space, distinct from the countries it divides. From the Rio Grande Valley to southern Arizona and California, Anselmi’s work is a testament to the power of photography to bridge divides and foster a deeper understanding of our shared humanity. Anselmi invites us to engage with the borderlands’ landscapes and narratives on a personal level, to understand the myriad ways in which borders shape and are shaped by human lives.

My America

By Diana Matar

GOST Books, 2024 | 110 pages | $65

In the U.S., approximately 1,000 people continue to die each year in encounters with police; more than any other industrialized nation. My America is an archive of and memorial to victims of these encounters. The black and white photographs—taken at locations where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers— create a quiet but chilling critique of the contemporary United States. At seemingly banal landscapes of city parks, shopping malls, parking lots, mobile homes, empty fields, and roadside highways, Diana Matar declares that what happened at these locations matters and questions the link between landscape and memory. Traveling alone on highways, back roads, and city streets to reveal something beyond statistics, the result is a book designed with respect to the victims but also rich with information about the structural reasons why these events continue to occur at such a high rate. The scale of the book attests to the scale of the problem yet Matar asks us to remember these are individuals. 

Years Like Water

By Nadia Sablin

Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2023 | 128 pages | $49

Years Like Water is a decade-long look at a small Russian village, its inhabitants, ramshackle institutions, nature, and mythology. The series loosely follows the lives of four interconnected families – the children growing up unsupervised in a magical wilderness, while the adults struggle for survival. Over more than ten years of visits, photographer Nadia Sablin attended birthdays and funerals, drank tea with the grandmothers, and listened to stories of the villagers’ loneliness and love for one another. Sablin’s ongoing projects are primarily based in rural Russia and Ukraine, spanning years of children growing up, elders growing old, and the practical ways in which people cope with the passage of time in unstable economic environments. Most of her work explores the larger world through intimately observed narratives, memory, fact, and myth. Sablin’s photographs from Alekhovshchina explore and describe a world that doesn’t fit into the neat narrative of “Putin’s Russia” presented by both Eastern and Western media. It is more complicated – interweaving beauty, poverty, trauma, and hope.

A Poor Imitation of Death: Youth in the California Prison System

By Ara Oshagan

Daylight Books, 2024150 pages | $50

A Poor Imitation of Death is a complex and collaborative narrative between photographer Ara Oshagan and the incarcerated youth he photographed from 2000-2003. Meshing photographs with the youth’s handwritten letters, poems, and artwork, this work creates a unique and authentic voice that speaks about the realities of life in prison. It tells a harsh story: full of despair, raw emotion, and injustice but also of incredible resilience, inner strength, and huge potential for change. Upon entering the metal gates and barbed wire at a California prison, Oshagan discovered kids who were respectful, asked questions, were engaged, and who also carried extremely hard histories that included marginalization and abuse. For Oshagan “this project, beyond being about incarceration, is about connection, about breaking down barriers of perception, about a process to humanize these youth against a vast system—internal and external—that incessantly and ruthlessly dehumanizes them.” Beyond highlighting some of the inherent and inhumane problems with the justice system in the United States, this project is a statement of solidarity and celebrates the resilience of the youth and honors their stories and voices.